Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Obama-Calderon Meeting

Calderon mainly pushed Obama to continue U.S. assistance in responding to the narco-fueled violence that has paralyzed Mexican society since Calderon’s election in 2006.

“The more secure Mexico is, the more secure [the] U.S. will be,” said Calderon referring to the importance of U.S. cooperation in the struggle to halt the expanding crime wave from spreading even further. Recently, the U.S. released another $99 million dollars of the proposed $1.3 billion allocated to the Merida Initiative program that was engineered under the Bush administration.

Obama mechanically praised Calderon’s troubled anti-drug offensive and pledged to help stop the southbound flow of weapons and laundered U.S. funds that fuel the drug cartels’ enterprises, and pledged to continue to back the Merida Initiative framework. But, under the present perilous economic situation it will remain to be seen whether the administration will be able to continue funding the program at the present level.

The Mexican president expressed strong opposition to Obama’s campaign promise of reengineering NAFTA, a topic that was pressed but brought only perfunctory acknowledgements from the new administration’s spokesperson, Robert Gibbs.

Read it all here.

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